Creating a Rails admin panel from scratch, part 1: The dashboard:

Behind the scenes, I’ve built a simple little blogging application with an articles scaffold and an authentication system. See Authentication from Scratch (Revised) from Railscasts (subscription required) to see the basic approach I followed to set up logins for the application. One place I’ve cheated: For the most part I’ve generated a lot of code ahead of time, and I’ve ignored the tests my scaffolds generated. I also wanted to show you a nice trick for adapting existing, scaffold-generated controllers and views to an admin panel interface. I typically wouldn’t do that in a real Rails application, but I wanted to make this tutorial specific to admin panels.